Tag Archives: the coward conscience

We note with great interest the possible discovery of the bones of Richard III at the site of the fifteenth century friary of Greyfriars, in the choir of the old church, excavated from beneath a Leicester car park.

Shakespeare, whose characterization of Richard III drew heavily from a tendentious bit of propaganda scribed by Sir Thomas More, nonetheless provides us with an exceptionally vivid examples of interior disharmony:

Shakespeare had a keen ear for such acrimony between the “me” and the “myself”, which he understood as the essence of consciousness, Plato’s “soundless dialogue”. The worm of conscience chews away invisibly at the public ego, capable of anything; for the duration of the play Richard tries to dig the worm from his brain because:

Shakespeare also knew a thing or two about bones, and their ambiguous and often discordant tales. In Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony delivers the famous line:

“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.”

As the bones of Richard III may now be disinterred, we wonder: what good will come from them?